The rise and fall of (Chinese) African apparel exports

During the final years of the Multifiber Agreement (2001-2005) the US imposed quotas on Chinese apparel while it gave African apparel duty- and quota-free access. We argue that the combination of these policies led to a rapid but ephemeral rise of African exports that can be explained in part by ethnic-Chinese firms using Africa as a quota-hopping export platform. We first provide a large body of anecdotal evidence on the ethnic-Chinese apparel wave in Africa. Second, we show that Chinese exports to Africa predict US imports from the same countries and in the same apparel categories but only where transhipment incentives are present, i.e. for products facing US quotas and in countries with preferential access to the US unconstrained by rules of origin. Our estimates indicate that direct transhipment may account for around 22% of Africa's apparel exports during 2001-2008

Realizability algebras II : new models of ZF + DC

Using the proof-program (Curry-Howard) correspondence, we give a new method to obtain models of ZF and relative consistency results in set theory. We show the relative consistency of ZF + DC + there exists a sequence of subsets of R the cardinals of which are strictly decreasing + other similar properties of R. These results seem not to have been previously obtained by forcing.Comment: 28

Why I am not a QBist

Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism, is a recent development of the epistemic view of quantum states, according to which the state vector represents knowledge about a quantum system, rather than the true state of the system. QBism explicitly adopts the subjective view of probability, wherein probability assignments express an agent's personal degrees of belief about an event. QBists claim that most if not all conceptual problems of quantum mechanics vanish if we simply take a proper epistemic and probabilistic perspective. Although this judgement is largely subjective and logically consistent, I explain why I do not share it.Comment: Added remarks and clarifications; forthcoming in Foundations of Physic

GUEST EDITORIAL

Ethnic studies is a rather strange field. In the first place, it is not a field in the traditional sense of other academic disciplines, but rather it seeks to include any and all disciplines. Second, it deals with people, and as our colleagues in the so-called behavioral sciences have discovered, people are perhaps the most unpredictable of all living things to study, thus the problems are many. Third, many of the subjects which we in ethnic studies have chosen to research, by the very nature of the fact that we deal with ethnic minorities, have tended to strike others not in a rational, objective manner, but in a purely emotional manner. For example, the word history does not usually cause any reaction in most people. However, the addition of black, female, Mexican American, or Native American to history immediately causes almost everyone to have an opinion on the subject, and normally retiscent [reticent] individuals now find themselves compelled to voice this opinion